Reliability and validity of the auditory hallucination-like experience scale

Abstract

Auditory hallucinations are important symptoms when making a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Since normal people may also experience auditory hallucinations, there may be a spectrum of auditory hallucinations ranging from those experienced in schizophrenia to those experienced by normal people. To assess the propensity to auditory hallucinations in a non-clinical population, we selected forty items from the questionnaire in Tanno, Ishigaki, & Morimoto (1998) and developed the Auditory Hallucination-like Experience Scale (AHES). Test-retest reliability showed that the AHES was internally consistent. There were high correlations between the AHES and the STA subscale and the overall O-LIFE (especially'unusual experiences'), both of which are thought to be strongly related to schizophrenia. Furthermore, the rate of false positives was higher in people more prone to auditory hallucinations than in the group less prone to auditory hallucinations. Factor analysis revealed that the AHES consists of four factors. The results suggest that the AHES has high reliability and validity as a measure of susceptibility to hallucinations.